PROFESSIONAL: Travel Maps and Guidebooks – new trends

Virgil was Dante's guide around Hell. T-R today is posing the question - what directs travellers these days in their search for a holiday heaven? The Divine Comedy is a work of genius and in way an immortal guidebook, but for our earthly trips we are looking for different qualities. T-R Review looks at the world of contemporary guides; what is the spectrum of their publications, who writes them, how and when they are updated. An omnipresent Internet challenges the “good old books” market and we focus our attention on the question of how on-line publications coexist, complement, or compete with traditional guides and booklets.

Articles

In the summer of 1981, Mark Ellingham, a recent graduate from Bristol University, was travelling round Greece and couldn't find a guidebook that really met his needs. On the one hand there were the student guides, banging on about saving every last cent, and on the other the heavyweight cultural tomes whose authors seemed to have spent more time in a research library than lounging away the afternoon at a taverna or on the beach ...

Lonely Planet was founded after Tony and Maureen Wheeler fled London and hit the road in search of adventure in 1972. Recently married, they took the trip in a hopeless attempt to get travel out of their systems before settling into 'real' jobs. They travelled overland across Asia and landed in Australia. After arriving there, the Wheelers were approached by so many would-be travelers with incessant questions. So they compiled their journey notes and stapled together their first travel guide; A...

With niche travel growing and time-to-market becoming a challenge for traditional guidebook publishers, one marketer wondered if paid digital products could bridge the gap between printed guidebooks and the massive amounts of content online already.
The question is: would customers be willing to open their wallets, and what kind of content made sense in a downloadable format. We’ve got the lowdown on what worked ...

“In your Pocket” Guides embody a dream of virtual reality philosophers: they combine on-line publications with traditional booklets and are closely connected with local realities. Oksana Morgunova, executive editor of RT and Heidi McAlpin, Managing Editor of Belfast In Your Pocket, discuss the past, present and future of such cross-over periodicals in their on-line interview ...

London: A Life In Maps brings together around 200 maps, plans and exhibits to tell the story of London’s development from Roman times to the present day. According to Peter Barber, Head of the Maps Library at the British Library and curator of the show, the exhibition is long overdue. “This is the first major exhibition devoted to London maps for 40 years,” he explained. The British Library Map Library is the UK’s national map library, containing nearly 4.5 million maps, atlases, globes and book...